What happened
Meme stocks are striking back on an up day for the market as the premier internet chat room favorites AMC Entertainment Holdings (AMC) and GameStop (GME 2.56%) are rallying heading into noontime trading Monday, rising 7% and 4.4%, respectively.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 are both also up for the day so far, rising less than 1% at 11:45 a.m. ET.
Image source: Getty Images.
So what
It wasn't an especially memorable box office this past weekend, although Thor: Love and Thunder managed to hold up well even as its take slipped 68% in its second week. But movies in general are doing well this year; the worldwide box office of $4.42 billion year to date is almost equal to all of 2021's $4.49 billion.
A lot of that is due to the tremendous success of Tom Cruise's Top Gun: Maverick, which has pulled in $1.2 billion globally since its May 27 release. AMC, as the biggest theater operator, stands to benefit the most from the public's continued interest in the big-screen experience, and the company recently reported its busiest weekend of the year.
For GameStop, its shares are rising ahead of its 4-for-1 stock split that will occur at the close of trading today, while also riding a mildly successful launch of its non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace last week that saw over $3.5 million in transactions occur.
Now what
The drivers of the current stock action are actually business-related moves, which tend not to play a big role with these two companies. As meme stocks, they often rise and fall based on how much chatter they generate on social media, but sometimes the two coincide.
